Preface- new patch feels like huge steps in the right directions.  Everything feels so much more fresh and with a lot more depth.  Not that it was bad before, but this is the first moment where I really feel i'm playing ES 2, not just a poilished ES 1.

1. Weapons and the like have awful glance value now.  The new icons are pretty, but I cannot tell just by looking if the shields/armor/weapons/modules on my ship are better or worse than the ones I have access to other than hovering over each one.  In fact it's very hard to tell in general where I am on the weapon tech tree (which is important because you can find weapons on expeditions...which is very cool...but maybe needs balancing).  Please give them some way to quickly identify what tier/type i'm at.

2.  Discovering weaponry/ship tech on expeditions makes sense, but again it's hard to figure out how good what you just found was.

3.  It seems there's no more free weapon upgrades by just going down the tech tree (the era 1/2/3/4 basic weapons/armor), which if true is likely a very good move.  I do want to have someone confirm that for me as I just finally got my first win on the new patch on serious so i'm not feeling great.

4.  On that note however new ships seems to have a basic armor and weapon level independent of your tech level.  If you research 0 weaponry (yay lumeris + few constellations.  Just focused the CP upgrades), but go up to say the mid tier ships their base design armor and weaponry is STRONGER than anything you can put on the ship.  This is sorta fine maybe (if the weaponry is weak enough compared to actual resource using weaponry from the tech tree), but whats terrible is that if you remove these weapons/armor because you didn't notice,  and place worse stuff on it, and save, you will actually make your ship worse AND never be able to put those modules back on them again.

It maybe should just use your base tech, but the other option might be giving them whatever "basics" that tier of ship gives BUT ONLY those.  For example the tier 2 lumeris hunter has nothing but missiles so I had much much better missiles than the rest of my tech, but could easily be countered because a heavy anti missile defense would totally screw me as all my other weapons were much much weaker.  This would lead to some interesting potential counterplay vs those who just rely on the ship side of the tech tree for their military vs someone who actually goes up the weapon tech side and can swap out freely.

Either way current version kinda blows.

5. Got into a war with the riftborn, and had way out teched them with my aforementioned ships.  Was going on an invasion spree, and every single system they'd send their fleets, then start a battle, then I'd set up my fleets or just quick select, and then they'd retreat.  EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

After retreating they'd heal up their ships (dust cost wasn't nearly enough to stop the quick heals, and even if not this was tedious as hell even if they had to wait for natural healing), and just do it again.  With 2-3 fleets constantly doing this it felt like a huge waste of time.

The issue is that as player I could be MUCH more obnoxious to another human invader with this strategy.  Having a lot of small fleets starting battles and retreating just to waste their time and attention while I build up something real to sucker punch them with in the endless stream of retreating trash (that literally never fights).

Now first off, I still haven't looked at the full tech tree.  I highly recommend both a ship module, and a planet defense, that disables enemy retreating (maybe even make it an ability of one of the ships rather than defender/attacker), if it doesn't exist already.  If it does someone please take pity on me and let me know.

Second, I still think that even if there's a tech unless its super low in the tree (i really haven't glanced at half of it), there might need to be a better ruling on this, as forcing that tech to be grabbed to prevent hyper obnoxious time wasting play (which is way better than just waiting while your trash does nothing or gets cleaned up), isn't really fun or interesting and removes retreating from the game.  I'd love if retreating was an actual card that had your ships run asap, so you could run cards against it to target specific types of ships or go for an alpha strike, and maybe even later see partial or delayed retreats (have entire flotillas stay for whatever amount of the fight, and then retreat to lower their damage and let other flotillas clean up, or drop all your weaker ships in a flotilla that retreats asap while the rest stay and fight).

Again if all this exists already please just direct me to where and forgive me.

6. New modules feel..off, but I haven't really gone down them heavily yet so it might be me.  I see the "get dust/science per cp" and a few other things like "lower or raise targeting weight" which feels super unintuitive/non obvious (why do I want this?  Is it that much better than something else on a ship that already will be targeted/not targeted due to its class?  Would I ever use these for the opposite effect?  How can I ever easily tell if it's more effective than alternatives?), but I really liked the synergy stuff that gave flotilla boosts.  I know some of that still exists, but I'm hoping it's a lot more prevalent than what i've seen (previous apology still applies).

Think that's all for now.  I'll have more later.  I'm still working on how to get my early game off the ground because it's currently a disaster with most the races for me, hence the lumeris fallback (fuck it i'll just make dust and influence and BUY the galaxy seemed like something I could handle).

Hi,

Just jumping in about the issue of the AI retreating... it does sound strange. Do you recall if the balance of power was even ? Do you remember if the AI's fleet were at max CP ? Would you still happen to have the save by any chance ? 

I just finally got my first win on the new patch on serious so i'm not feeling great.

Well you should feel great, it can be challenging to win on serious! :)